Satisfaction
Two kinds of men
walk this world: the detail-oriented
and the visionary. Myself—to spend my time
tending the messy minutiae of implementation
would rob the world of the greatest gift
I can give, my fertile brain.
An idea man, my greatest
fear is being trapped
by my own progeny,
incessant demands
vampirizing my freedom.
Soon I no longer spend my nights
in the throes of passionate brainstorm.
Instead I try to sleep for once,
awakened again for some crappy task
unavoidably my responsibility.
Remaining officially devoted
to the project, I yearn
for the day when it's matured
beyond the need for daily involvement
and my youthful freedom returns
too late to enjoy. That or I go out
for a pack of cigarettes
and never come back.
Like most young men, what drives me
is the potent primordial instinct
to start new projects (thinking about them
on average every seven seconds). But I'm not
meant to be a Project Manager! Me, I'm a cowboy:
freewheeling, freethinking, roaming, conceiving
ideas and moving on, leaving quality assurance
to the detail guys—Nice Guys
who go to church every Sunday
and never have an original thought
and never experience true intellectual virility.
I'll be remembered
as the Johnny Appleseed of ideas. No—
I'll be the Genghis Khan of ideas. Inspired, fearless,
I go where I please. I conceive brainchildren
and easily leave them to the care of others.
Someday one in two hundred tropes
will be traceable directly to my throbbing brain.
Why other men choose
a workaday life of implementation
I'll never understand.
What possible satisfaction
comes of waking morning after morning
to the sight of the same wrinkled, ever-fattening
to-do list staring back at you? Why waste decades
realizing just one or two dreams,
forsaking ten thousand others, resigning yourself
never to taste their delights?
No—the safest place for a man like me
is the open range of unshackled imagination,
the open road of branching possibility,
the lawless sea of my own creative juices
teeming with unnamed creatures.
But I must know
before too long—
Is there some shy treasure,
some sight or sound or textured delicacy,
some deep demiurgic satisfaction
unfolding only before the patient and the dogged?